Balenciaga / Fall 2011 RTW

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There’s no ready label to slap on the brisk, confident modernity of Balenciaga’s fall collection—it’s certainly not “street” or “punk,” like last season, and it doesn’t fit the Cristobal redux references which have been doing the rounds recently. This time, it was much better than that. Nicolas Ghesquière dealt in the kind of nuanced aesthetics that could only come from his hand, and today: a balance of asymmetric mid-length skirts and hyper-huge knitted leathers, which then moved into new proportions based on tunics over narrow pants. Simultaneously clean and complex, it was simply an inspiring thing to watch—the kind of show that makes women, on the spot, reevaluate what they want to wear.

Ghesquière said he’d come to this collection by thinking about “scale and perspective, dimension and distance.” If that sounds like the words of an artist studying materials in a formal, sculptural manner, in a way, it was, but listen to the source: It was the Balenciaga archive. “I was looking at the incredible structures of the fabric and embroidery he did.” What Ghesquière rediscovered were extraordinary elements like celluloid paillettes and fishnet fabric—as well as a 1960 fuchsia tunic, which he reprised somewhere in the middle of the show. That research took him in a completely different direction from the early sixties rounded shoulders, cocoon backs, and edge-to-edge coats, which have been recurring on other runways—the trend that has taken off in the wake of the Balenciaga retrospective at the Queen Sofía Spanish Institute. “Luckily,” he smiled, “I have access all the time—we don’t have to wait for an exhibit!”

The point here is the way Ghesquière takes the intellectual stimulus of Balenciaga’s original work to jump off into completely contemporary thinking. He feels free to use synthetic pleather in slick jackets and as bands inserted in a hemline to create drape; to add hallucinatory prints involving trees, flowers, and reptiles; and to exaggerate those knitted leathers to play with form. That kind of experimentalism might have caused a lesser designer to end up with a conceptual collection, but the mark of Ghesquière’s intelligence is that however amazing the surfaces, the result is a completely rational elegance. In the end, the mark of his success is that no one really needs to know where the references are in these clothes. Simply, here are extraordinary coats, elegant skirts, amazing Guernsey-like sweaters, and a fantastic set of ideas about wearing narrow pants under a beautifully draped tunic for evening: It’s just about a raving desire to wear.